


they must've brought along space's loneliness

by likewinning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-26 01:12:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1669217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likewinning/pseuds/likewinning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU, set pre-season six (and ignoring a certain part of "Abandon All Hope"). <em>She keeps quiet, though. She tells Dean where he can put his music collection and rolls her eyes when he flirts with everything on legs. She walks him back from every bar in every town and doesn’t say a damn thing when he wakes up screaming six days out of seven.<em></em></em></p>
            </blockquote>





	they must've brought along space's loneliness

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Songs: Ohia.

For two weeks, Dean keeps his promise to Sam. He fixes his car, sleeps next to Lisa, eats dinner at six on the dot every night and watches the nine o’clock news. He lets Ben kick his ass at _Guitar Hero_ , drinks too much, and never remembers which day is trash day.

He tries. He _tries_. Lisa gives him plenty of room, more than he deserves given the way he showed up, and even Ben seems to know to be careful, after a while.

"Tell me about your brother. I always wanted a brother," he says once, and Dean almost tells him. He thinks it must suck to be an only child, remembers how lonely he was before Sam. The neighborhood kids in Lawrence were always tired of playing cops and robbers before he was, tired of Dean being the bad guy with enough of a story to win.

He thinks of how lonely he is _now_ , without Sam. Ben will probably never know what that’s like.

"No," Dean says, and it’s the clearest sign since he pulled in here that this – Ben, Lisa, his toothbrush in the cup by the sink and his jacket on an honest-to-god hanger – is temporary. He loves this kid, could maybe convince himself to love Lisa, but he’s not telling them about Sam. If he opens his mouth even once, Dean thinks, everything about Sam will pour out till his lips go dry and his throat aches, and Sam will be a story instead of a memory. It’s crazy and it’s selfish, maybe, but Dean’s sure as fuck earned the right to be both.

"No," Dean repeats. Ben looks confused, and Dean remembers that only children aren’t familiar with that word.

Dean tries, but after two weeks, he takes Lisa’s tiny, _never held a gun in her life_ hands in his and says, "Listen."

He’s out before dawn, headed nowhere, the Impala rumbling under him and _Zeppelin III_ in the tape deck. He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go, what he’s supposed to do, but there’s still hunting. He’s spent weeks trying to forget, but he hasn’t forgotten how to do that.

*

The first time Jo sees Dean Winchester in over a year, they’re both at some bar in Baton Rouge. Jo’s working a case; Dean might be doing the same thing. If he is, though, he’s four drinks past too drunk for it.

Jo glares off the two college girls eyeing Dean up, buys him a plate of the greasiest fries she’s ever seen, and grabs them both a booth near the back.

She doesn’t ask any questions, and Dean doesn’t volunteer anything. The stereo system plays some shitty pop rock and Dean stares her down, drunk-eyed and shaky-handed, and Jo tries not to feel too good about herself for not flinching. Not blinking.

Dean looks like shit. Dean looks how he should, like life’s kicked him in the balls one too damn many times. Dean looks like someone who’s died, gone to hell, died and come back again, lost everything he ever loved but like he somehow manages to climb into that damn car of his and keep his foot on the gas pedal.

Jo orders herself a Jack and Coke and forgets about the case for a night. They don’t talk, not until the waitress comes by again and Dean forgets to check her out, and even then it’s just Jo babbling bullshit about the things she’s seen, the places she’s been. Jo’s not listening and she’d figure Dean wasn’t, either, if it wasn’t for that flash in his eyes once in a while like – something. Like the world’s gone and ended on them, sure, but they’re still sitting here, and isn’t that fucking something?

It’s not _all right_ , Jo figures, but it’s sure as shit _something_.

They drink for a few hours, polish off the fries, and somewhere down the road Jo gets brave enough to say, "It was nice of you to tell me about Sam, by the way."

Dean doesn’t flinch, and Jo has to wonder about it. How many times you have to hear the name of the person who died before you don’t feel it anymore. How many beatings you have to take before getting up is easy as falling back down, but you choose the former anyway. "Jo, I woulda called –" Dean starts, but Jo cuts him off with a snort. "You didn’t even call for your damn goodbye tour."

For the first time all night, Dean’s lips quirk up. "My –?"

"Bobby," Jo says by way of explanation. Jo’d never say it, not to anyone, but she drove like hellfire to Bobby’s when she heard the news about Dean, two years back. She sat and drank and listened to Bobby tell stories about Dean’s last year. Bobby’s the only man alive who’s ever seen Jo cry, and she intends to keep it that way.

"Jo," Dean says. He leans across the table toward her and for a minute, Jo sees that old picture of him in her head. Scratched up face from a car crash, eyes already half-dead with grief, and the prettiest damn smile Jo’d ever seen. Has ever seen, if she’s honest, and let’s fucking agree that sometimes she can’t afford that.

Jo says, "I’m not a damn kid, Dean." And she’s not, anymore. Twenty-seven and battered and miles to go, maybe, but she’s no one’s little girl anymore. "You could’ve called." _I could’ve helped_ , she thinks uselessly at him. _Or I could’ve been there_.

"Jo," Dean says again, voice like whiskey and a promise he won’t keep and Jo’s blood runs with nostalgia for something she doesn’t want anymore, not really. "If I’da run off with you…"

"What?" Jo asks, smirking back now. She leans forward, and if she wanted to she could break the space between them, crash right the hell into it and tell the woman she’s become to sit tight for a minute. "My mother?"

Dean sits back in his seat, and the years fall back on his shoulders so quick you could blink and miss them. "Yeah," he says, quiet now. "Your mother."

"I heard –" Jo starts, then stops. Of course she heard about Sam, about the devil, _Lucifer_. In the hunting world, Sam Winchester’s been news for years. Antichrist, demon killer, psychic wonder – best friends with the Devil. The devil himself. Jo’s kept out of it the best she can – if there’s truth to it, she’s never seen it with her own two eyes. She keeps her ear to the ground and fights what’s in front of her.

"We should get out of here," is what she finally says. Dean looks up at her, big eyes and a sad smile, and Jo lets her heart skip that one beat that sounds something like _wrong-time, wrong-place_ , before she puts her hand on his arm and pulls.

"Not even gonna buy me dinner first?" Dean asks, flash to his eyes and voice like he might be fine, even when he’s not. Hunters have bravado in spades, sure, but Dean’s got a whole deck.

"Be decent of me, wouldn’t it?" Jo asks, but she elbows him in the side and gets him out the door. She half-carries him back to a motel, and they fall asleep in separate beds. By the morning he’s gone, easy as a ghost. Easier, since there’s no salt and burn. Jo finishes her case and moves along.

*

In Tallahassee, Dean sees Jo first. Another bar, three times as classy as the last one, and Jo’s sitting with her legs crossed prettily at the end of the counter, sipping at something pink and sickly-sweet looking Dean’d bet you couldn’t pay her to drink on a regular day. Like hunters have regular days. "Cristo," Dean mutters at her, and Jo looks up and murmurs, "Cristo yourself, jackass."

"You look good, Jo," Dean says, and it’s the truth. She’s dressed to the goddamn nines, little black dress and heels that’d cut through someone’s windpipe like butter, hair done up in the kind of complicated twist that back in the day Dean would’ve loved to get his hands on just to mess up.

"You don’t," Jo snaps back, and Dean knows that’s true, too. Three days worth of stubble and a smoking habit, a week hunting a goddamn harpy that used his arm for a chew toy before he wasted the thing. Three months without Sam, without any reason to keep going except that he promised.

Nevermind that he promised to quit hunting. Dying wishes can go fuck themselves, if you ask Dean.

Yeah, Dean’s looking like something half-gone, and Jo’s dressed up like something whose bones you could crush.

"Succubus," Jo explains when Dean orders himself a beer and quirks a half-interested eyebrow. "Thing has a type, I guess."

Dean doesn’t say anything about Jo playing bait, but she catches on anyway, raising an eyebrow right back. Dean thinks about pulling her over that line of salt in Philly, thinks about her prying a bullet out of his arm in Duluth. He doesn’t say anything when she walks away from him, heels on the barroom floor inaudible above the noise, doesn’t say a word while she hook line and sinkers the thing and leads it out back.

Dean finishes off his drink and shows up just in time to stab the thing in the heart, and Jo mutters, "Show off," but takes the hand Dean offers and lets him pull her to her feet. They leave the body in the alley.

The Impala’s twenty feet from the bar, and the hotel’s two miles down the road, and as soon as they’re inside the room Dean pushes Jo against the wall and crushes his mouth against hers. She gets her hand on the back of his neck and drags him down toward her at first, but pretty soon she’s climbing him like a damn tree, heels still on and her nails digging into his skin. Her teeth scrape Dean’s neck and Dean presses his thumbs into the jut of her hipbones. He pulls her dress up instead of down, gets her on her back on the bed, and she’s still saying his name like half a curse when she pulls him in closer.

"There’s a werewolf in Palm Beach," Dean tells her after, sweat-soaked and brushing the hair back from her neck. Her hair’s down now, and she’d look a lot closer to how she used to if it weren’t for her eyes, for the set of her mouth. She doesn’t pull back, but there’s no wonder in her eyes when she looks at him. Dean isn’t sure why he says it, what makes him ask without _asking_ her to come with him. It isn’t her skin against his, isn’t even that all things considered, she’s turned into a pretty decent hunter. He just does, and once the words are out, it doesn’t occur to him to take them back.

Jo sits up and starts to reach for her shoes, and she looks at him and then away, but there’s no hesitation when she says, "Yeah, all right."

*

"I’ve never hunted a werewolf before," Jo admits. They’ve been in the car for half a day, and they’ve already fought over the music so many times that they’ve decided regular radio is the safest choice. Dean only has so much Dylan, and Jo only brought along so much Neil Young.

There’s a lot more room in the Impala than Jo remembers. Jo’d been driving some beat-up truck she won off some poor bastard at a poker game in Alabama, but when Dean put the argument to her, she had to concede the Impala’s superiority. The truck was a bitch in stormy weather, anyway. It wouldn’t have made it through the winter.

Still, the Impala’s different from the front seat, and there are significantly fewer books in back without Sam around. She spies a beat-up copy of _Cat’s Cradle_ when she shoves her bag in the trunk, Burroughs under the seat when she has to dig around for a pen, but it’s different territory, here.

Jo knows her best bet is to buckle up and keep her arms inside the vehicle at all times, but _hell_ if that means seven straight hours of Zeppelin. Everyone knows Jimmy Page made a deal with the devil, and it wasn’t for anything fucking noble.

Dean looks over at her from the mirror. He hasn’t shaved in days, still, and Jo knows he spent the night watching infomercials on mute, but he could look worse. There’s always worse, Jo knows.

There’s always _dead_.

"They’re pretty fuckin’ vicious," Dean says after a minute. He’s quiet, none of the relish in his voice like Jo used to expect out of hunters. "First one I went up against tried to tear me in half."

"Thought they only go for the heart," Jo says, and Dean smirks. "Yeah, well. Their sense of direction ain’t perfect. Luckily, mine is."

Jo pretends not to appreciate the resurfaced bravado and just asks, "What about the next one?"

Dean’s eyes go back to the road. "I was sixteen the first time," he says. "You’ll be fine."

Jo ignores the fact that Dean at sixteen probably had nearly as much experience as Jo has _now_ , and makes a face at him. "Like hell I’m worried," she says. "I was just getting the facts."

"Of course," Dean says, with a grin that’s just short of real. "Tell you what, I’ll give you first shot at this one."

At the time, Jo rolls her eyes and reaches to turn the music up, but she does end up being the one to kill the werewolf. Three days of legwork later, three days without much sleep for either of them (but somehow, somehow, plenty of nightmares for Dean), and they wind up at some beach house where the werewolf’s holed up.

The werewolf’s name is Lydia. She’s forty-five, blonde, with a smoky voice that makes Jo think of her mom. They haven’t spoken for a week, because hell if Jo wants to hear what her mother has to say about Jo running off – _hunting_ – with a damn Winchester.

At least this one’s never tied her to a post. Jo’ll call, eventually, but for now she just keeps steady and shoots a silver bullet straight into the werewolf’s heart. The woman doesn’t move to stop her, doesn’t flinch. It’s nothing like Jo’s expecting.

Even monsters don’t have the same bite to them anymore, she guesses.

Dean drags the body out of the house and they build a pyre right there on the sand. There’s no one around to see them; the world feels suddenly empty. As the body burns, Jo keeps opening her mouth to say she’s not staying, that she’s a damn fine hunter on her own and she doesn’t need Dean around for corpse duty, for wheels, for anything. But when the fire burns itself out and Dean asks if he should drop her off somewhere, Jo just looks him in the eye and says, "You aren’t getting rid of me that easily, princess."

She’s always been a stubborn little shit, really. Dean makes a face and huffs about doing all the dirty work, but he crashes next to her in Lydia’s guest bedroom without either of them making a decision. He doesn’t reach for her, and she doesn’t move any closer, but they both sleep for the first time in days.

*

Just because Dean spends a lot of his time hunched over a barstool – any time he’s not hunting, any time Jo crashes before he does – doesn’t mean he’s stopped looking for ways to help Sam. He spends hours in front of Sam’s old laptop until his eyes hurt from the glare; he searches through every musty text he can find. He closes his eyes and prays to an angel he’s not sure he believes in anymore. And every night, he calls Bobby. He hits three on his speed dial and downs another shot of whiskey every time Bobby sighs over the line and says, "Sorry, kid, I’ve got nothin’."

They’re in Reno when Dean calls from a bar half a mile away from his and Jo’s motel. She was asleep before he left, passed out after a poltergeist thing at some police station. They both came out of the place bloody and tired, but even after they’d stitched up their wounds, Dean couldn’t sleep.

It’s 2AM, now, and Dean’s been drinking for hours, and when Bobby answers the phone, he snaps, "Damn it, Dean, don’t you think I’d tell you first thing if I knew anything?"

Before Dean can answer, can apologize, can murmur, "He’s my _brother_ , Bobby, I –" Jo puts a hand on his shoulder and he looks up at her. Her hair’s in a messy bun, feet stuffed bare into her boots, and Dean knows she rolled out of bed to come after him, but her eyes are already wide, alert, ready for whatever. She looks just as likely to drag Dean off quietly as she does to slug him for running out – and Dean feels a pang of guilt, because he knows if she took off, he’d go looking, too.

It’s just damn hard, sometimes, remembering there’s someone left who gives a shit.

Dean hears Bobby sigh and say his usual line, hears the music switch from alt-rock to warbling country, and he flips his phone closed. Jo takes the stool next to him and aims a none-too-gentle kick at his leg.

He doesn’t bother asking how Jo got here; it isn’t a cold night if she walked, and she’s plenty capable of borrowing whatever car she wants. "Nice of you to drop by," he says instead, and Jo rolls her eyes and drags Dean’s beer in front of her. "Couldn’t let you miss me too much, could I?" she asks, and Dean smirks at her but he doesn’t say anything else. It’s hard to have boundries when you spend this much damn time with someone, but they exist. You don’t say _please_ or _thank you_ or _I’m sorry_ , not unless you’re dying, and you sure as shit don’t ask _are you okay_ unless you’re looking for a fight.

It’s in a hunter’s guidebook somewhere, Dean bets.

Two songs play, and then another, and Jo finishes off Dean’s beer and sets it down on the counter before she says, "I want to help. With Sam."

Dean flinches; it’s the last thing he’s expecting her to say, right then. "I know you’re working on something to get him out of –" Jo’s words stop before she can say _hell_ , but Dean hears it anyway. He sees that cage, every variation on what it might look like, how it might feel, whether he’s asleep or awake.

"Jo," Dean starts, but Jo holds up a hand. Dean thinks it might be half the size of his. "You can say whatever shit you want about family, but you want him out of that cage, you need all the help you can get and you know it."

Dean looks at her. Really looks, at the thin line of her mouth, the determined set of those doe-brown eyes. He looks at her tiny hands, hands equipped to do work that would be most people’s worst nightmare.

Sam’s been dead almost four months, now, and every day it’s all Dean can do to keep his eyes open, keep his hands steady, keep his foot on the gas. What he’s lost can’t be put into words, but it’s _his_ loss, and –

"I can’t ask you to do that," Dean says. Whatever Dean needs to do for Sam, it won’t be pretty or easy, but it’s his responsibility. Asking Jo for help, it wouldn’t be like asking her to back him up – come with him – on hunts. It’d be closer to asking for blood.

Jo kicks him again, hard enough that he feels it through three beers and two shots of whiskey. "Well," she says, when Dean grimaces and rubs at his shin, "that’s just too fucking bad for you, isn’t it?" She gets to her feet, and even with Dean sitting down, they’re barely eye-level. "You can leave me behind," Jo says. "You can change your number. You can do whatever you need to, but as long as we’re in this, I’m gonna help you."

It’s more than Dean’s expecting, more than he could ever think to ask for himself, and he doesn’t say yes, or no, or any of the words that were so goddamn important just a few months ago. He just says, "Okay," and he lets Jo drag his stupid ass back to the motel room. He hands Jo his journal, his notes, everything he has so far before he crashes on one of the beds, boots and jacket still on. When he wakes up, Sam’s still dead and Jo looks tired, so tired, but when he looks over at her she gives him a fraction of a fraction of a smile. It’s something, somehow.

*

Three days later, Jo calls her mom from Cleveland. Her eyes already hurt from hour after hour spent reading over Dean’s notes; there’s so much, and nothing at all, and on the off chance Jo gets a few hours sleep, she dreams of hellfire.

Before she met the Winchesters, Jo never thought of Heaven and Hell as real things – real _places_ , almost like you’d find on a map. Her mom never told her any nonsense about her daddy being in a better place. The first time Jo exorcised a demon, she never thought about where she was sending some cloud of black smoke. She just knew once it was gone, it wasn’t likely to come back.

Now, helping Dean, she’s supposed to believe the opposite – that Sam can be pulled out. Saved, somehow. It’s only Dean that keeps her buying it – Dean, who’s been through fire and goddamn brimstone itself, and come back from it. When Jo thinks about it, really _thinks_ about it, it’s all she can do not to clench her firsts so tight her palms bleed. Not to shout. Not to cry.

When she thinks about it – those slow days in between hunts when it’s just them and the road or a room somewhere, those moments after a job where they’re bloody and tired but too adrenaline-high to sleep – it’s all she can do to keep her mouth shut, keep from telling Dean exactly what she thinks. She’s met plenty of good hunters by now, people who’d die for her, but few she’d call good men.

She keeps quiet, though. She tells Dean where he can put his music collection and rolls her eyes when he flirts with everything on legs. She walks him back from every bar in every town and doesn’t say a damn thing when he wakes up screaming six days out of seven.

Ellen picks up by the second ring, and just the sound of her saying Jo’s name makes Jo want to run to the home she doesn’t have anymore, makes her want to curl up in the arms she ran from half a dozen times.

Instead, she keeps quiet as Ellen mutters and curses at her, takes every variation of _fool_ in stride. She knows she’s asking for trouble, staying with Dean. Dean’s not his father and Jo isn’t hers, either, but that doesn’t mean she’s being anything close to _smart_.

She lets Ellen say her bit and she says hers – that she’s not leaving, not stopping. She’s quieter, though, than she used to be. There’s less fire in her voice than when she was twenty-two and wide-eyed, when she could hustle and fight but she still didn’t _know_. Doesn’t mean she means it any less than she did then, though, because she does. She does. She runs her hand over the table of the booth she’s sitting in while Dean does the legwork for the case they’re on, and Ellen sighs before saying, "You call me if you need anything, Jo." Jo nods and says, "Yeah, of course," even though she’s had her phone on silent for weeks.

"I mean it," Ellen says, and despite the sharp words, Jo hears the smile in her voice, feels one forming on her own lips. "And you knock that son of a bitch’s teeth down his throat if he gives you any trouble."

Jo laughs outright, startling the couple in the next booth, and her mom laughs, too, low and warm. "He’s still afraid of you, you know," Jo says once she catches her breath, even though she’s not sure it’s true anymore. Dean’s so far from the guy she flirted with one night four years ago in her mother’s bar, so far from the hunter with more scars than she’d ever be able to count but hope left in his eyes. They both are.

"He damn well better be," Ellen says, and Jo smiles again. She tells her mom she loves her and when they say goodbye, Jo’s no closer to answers, no closer to helping Dean save his brother or to helping _Dean_ , but she knows, she _knows_ , she’s doing the right thing. 

Dean comes into the diner half an hour later, and while he flirts with the waitress and orders half the menu, Jo thinks of how she’d wanted him, once. Like something out of a storybook for lonely, friendless girls with bruised knuckles and absent (dead, salt & burned) fathers. Like a bullseye to hit, a prize to earn. She thinks of how close she got after Pittsburgh, how he’d said, "Jo did good out there," before her mom turned it all around. Before Sam’s voice whispered in her ear, _My daddy shot your daddy in the head._

Story over. Everything done with, not for his father’s crimes but for her own inability to be anyone but her father’s daughter. Someone who’d play bait. Martyr. Anything for a damn Winchester.

She isn’t that girl, anymore. She’ll save his life – it’s _Dean_ – but she won’t crush her own to pieces. Wrong time for that, and too late besides.

Dean slides the coroner’s report across the table to her, and Jo grimaces. She _really_ hates vampires.

*

Cleveland turns into the closest Dean’s had to a decent job in months. He and Jo take down a nest of twenty, maybe thirty vampires, hacking through every damn one with a couple of machetes between them. They’re not the smartest fangs Dean’s ever met, granted – most of them seem newly turned, too disoriented to put up much of a fight – but when they leave the abandoned building where the vamps had been holed up, there’s something like victory pumping through Dean’s blood.

He remembers, for a second, what that felt like. Winning.

"That didn’t suck," Dean says, and the moon’s high and full tonight, providing plenty of light for Dean to see Jo roll her eyes. She’s covered in blood; they both are, and Dean’s pretty sure it’s going to take them a couple of showers each to get them anywhere near clean, but when they get back to the car Jo’s smiling, too.

"You know," she starts. Dean sets the machetes back in the trunk and reaches for the first aid kit – an old box from Dad’s era, mostly full of gauze and sewing needles, disinfectant and pain killers. It’s a quiet night, now, warm for October, and they’re in the middle of nowhere, nothing but a field and an old factory building around. "This is what I used to think about."

Dean shuts the trunk and motions for Jo to sit. She rolls up her sleeve, and Dean quirks an eyebrow at her before he starts to clean the wound. "You’ve got some weird fantasies, Jo," he mutters.

"Dumbass," Jo says. She breathes out, in again. The cut Dean cleans isn’t deep, but there’ll be a scar. "I mean, this kind of case – find the monster, kill the monster, save some people. I thought this was how it’d be, even knowing –"

He bandages her up and starts to pull her sleeve back down, but she swats his hand away to do it herself.

"I mean," she says, and Dean’s eyes are on the scratch on her stomach, but he hears the little smile tilting her lips, same one she uses to call him stupid or special, same difference. "It ain’t like I saw the guys at the Roadhouse and thought, yeah, _they’re_ living the dream. But this – it’s –"

She breathes out again, and as he smoothes the bandage over her skin Dean nods to say he gets it. She pulls her shirt back down and hops off the trunk, shoving Dean lightly against the car and then starting on him. He watches her work for a minute; her hands are steadier than they were years ago, sure and quick. Then he says, "First time I hunted these things, it felt like a joke. Still does, sometimes. _Vampires_." He scoffs, shrugs. Jo tapes up a cut on his forearm and smiles up at him. Her mouth opens and closes, and then she ducks her head again, tangles of blonde hair brushing his skin briefly before she pulls back and busies herself with putting things away.

"Sam never saw it like we do, you know?" Dean asks, and Jo stops, but she doesn’t look at him. "It was never easy for him. Even cases like this, he’d…" Dean trails off, and after a minute, Jo glances back over. She looks less steady, now, not tired but just – wary, and not for the first time, Dean wonders why she’s here. How she can listen to him, put up with him, drag him out of bars and hunt with him, when most days, he’s a damn timebomb. He’s blood and bone and nightmares, and not much else.

But then, he never really knew why Sam stayed, either, except out of blood and obligation. It’s always blood.

Jo brushes her hair back from her face and then nudges his boot with hers. "We’ll get him back, Dean," she says, and Dean nods, smiles at her just enough to prove he’s heard, even if he doesn’t believe her. He wants to, and he guesses that’s sort of the point.

*

By the time they hit St. Paul, Minnesota, Jo’s gone through everything Dean or Bobby or anyone knows about Sam half a dozen times. She’s hunted down books half-covered in blood; she’s dreamt of cages made of hellfire and bone. She’s stood still and quiet in a graveyard in Lawrence, Kansas while Dean shouted drunken curses at a patch of grass that refused to swallow him up.

She’s pulled Dean to his feet, pushed shots of whiskey into his hands, and hidden the Impala’s keys in the pockets of her own leather jacket until they both sobered up. She kisses him outside some bar in Omaha, lets him drag his lips along her collarbone in Jefferson City. They fuck against the wall of some motel room in Chicago and it’s half an apology for something missing, half something else. She curls up against his chest there, just the sound of his heartbeat at this point some kind of damn miracle.

They stop for gas in St. Paul, and Jo heads inside to grab the day’s ration of candy bars and energy drinks, chips and Hostess snack cakes. She’s headed toward the coolers to grab herself a Coke when she sees him, there at the end of the aisle.

"Cristo," she mutters, and Sam looks up at her, but he doesn’t flinch. His eyes don’t go black. He looks at her and he smiles, faint and untrue.

"Hey, Jo," he says, and it seems to Jo that the words come out too easily – Jo, who’s been trying to save him for a month now; Jo, who spends every goddamn minute with Dean, playing partner and sister and lover and somewhere at the base of it all, friend.

She drops what she’s carrying onto one of the shelves and moves forward, ignoring the flash of memory of the last time she saw Sam – tied to a chair and black demon smoke clouding his eyes, a lifetime’s supply of salt and holy water on hand, Rufus standing next to her.

There’s an eternity, and then another, before she spits, "Where the _fuck_ have you been?"

This isn’t Lawrence, and if Sam dug himself out of anywhere, it doesn’t look like it happened recently. He looks at ease, gun tucked into his back pocket and a knife or two no doubt concealed in each boot, but calm all the same. Ready for any damn thing.

Sam smirks, and Jo nearly hits him. Her younger self would’ve, would’ve shouted and cursed like some dumb high school girl who catches her boyfriend cheating. Instead, she folds her arms across her chest and Sam asks, "Not even gonna check if I’m a demon? Shapeshifter, maybe? Ask me twenty questions?"

"I already asked you one," Jo snaps, but she’s wishing already that she’d splashed him with holy water, gouged him with silver just to be sure. She knows it’s him, she _knows_ , and that’s what’s got her twisted up inside. She digs her nails into her arms, all she can do not to tear the skin of a man whose skin she’s been trying to _save_.

"I’ve been hunting, Jo," Sam says. "Just like you."

Jo snorts. "Not exactly like me. We’ve been –" the words feel childish, but she decides _fuck it_ and says them anyway – "trying to save you."

Sam’s eyes finally widen slightly at we. "You and –"

"Dean," Jo finishes for him. She ignores her instincts and reaches for his wrist. "He’s right out there, Sam. We’ve – come on."

Sam doesn’t move. Jo’s strong, but not strong enough. " _Sam_ ," she says again, and he shakes his head. "I can’t, Jo. And I can’t tell you how I got out, so don’t ask me." Before Jo can say something sharp like she _didn’t_ fucking ask, thank you very much, Sam looks her up and down and asks, "You and Dean, huh?" and Jo flinches, hears _He likes you, sure, but_ … and lets go of his wrist.

"Sam," she tries, quieter. Dean’s out there, right out there, and she can’t fucking believe they have to argue about this at all. If it was her, she – "Sam, he’s your brother."

"I know," Sam says. His tone’s flat, worse than possessed. Jo stares up at him and waits. "But you can’t tell him I’m back, Jo. Not yet."

"Why –" Jo starts, but Sam shakes his head again. "I’ll tell him when he’s ready. He wouldn’t understand, yet." Sam gives her some smile that makes her feel all of two years old. "You just keep an eye on him, Jo."

Jo wants to say _fuck you_. She wants to tell Sam exactly how Dean’s been without him, how she herself probably doesn’t know the half of it. She wants to punch his teeth right down his throat, but the bell rings above the door and she glances that way, and by the time she looks back, Sam’s gone.

She doesn’t look for him. She pays for her things, gets back to the Impala, and when Dean asks her what the hell took so long, she smiles fierce and tight but true, _true_ , and asks, "Aww, princess, did you miss me? It’s that time of the month and they were hiding the tampons." Dean makes a face and starts the car, and Jo keeps her eyes on the road and lets Dean play his stupid music for hours afterward.

*

For most of November, Dean keeps driving west. They take down a coven in Colorado, a djinn in New Mexico, and in between each hunt, Jo curls up in the passenger seat with book after book about Hell. They both drink too much coffee; they both have too many nightmares, and the further they go, the less Dean’s sure they’re doing the right thing.

Dean knows he’s going to keep trying to save Sam. He’ll work on autodrive, on alcohol and exhaust fumes, until he drops or something else drops him. But that doesn’t have to be Jo’s life. She doesn’t need to fight for Sam, not the way Dean does. Sam’s dead, and some small part of Dean knows that’s how he should leave him.

He won’t, but he _should_.

They keep going. Jo calls Ellen a few times while they’re in the car, and Dean smiles a little to himself while Jo and Ellen bicker like no time’s passed. In Flagstaff, Jo sprains her wrist when a shapeshifter gets a little too rough with her, and Ellen calls Dean up just to shout at him about it.

"Tell her I’m twenty fucking seven," Jo mutters from the passenger seat. Her arm’s bandaged up and she downed a few painkillers, but instead of taking it easy, she’s still knee-deep in books.

"I’m not using that kind of language on your mother," Dean shoots back, but he’s holding back laughter even as Ellen uses curse words Dean’s never even heard before.

Once Ellen finishes threatening each of Dean’s appendages individually, Dean hands the phone to Jo and she and Ellen get quiet, just talking normally. He catches some bits about fixing up a house, and Jo tells Ellen how pretty the mountains were, and then Jo says, "Yeah, I love you, too, Mom," before she hangs up. Dean turns the music up and sings along for hours, trying not to think about anything.

He waits until Anaheim, a week later, to say, "You should go for a while."

They’re in some motel, sitting at a rickety little table covered in newspaper clippings from the hunt they finished the night before. Jo’s half dressed, jeans and a tank top, circles under her eyes and hair in a messy ponytail. Neither of them has slept much in weeks, and Dean knows it’s his fault.

Jo raises both eyebrows at him. "Go where?" she asks, like Dean’s just asked her to do something as simple as grab them something to eat. Dean clears his throat, starts again. "I mean, you should – go see your mom, or…" his words die off, awkward but not unsure. Jo shouldn’t have to be here. Even Bobby only takes half his calls by now.

"My mom?" Jo asks, and Dean shouldn’t be relieved to hear that defiance to her voice, to see that look in her eyes, but he is, a little. "You been talking to my mother, Dean? ‘Cause –"

"I just," Dean says. He starts to reach across the table for her wrist, then thinks better of it and stands up. He doesn’t look at her when he says, "You shouldn’t have to deal with all of this, Jo. Sam’s – Sam’s gone. I know that," he says, and when he looks back at Jo her eyes are bright, sad.

"Dean," she says, carefully, but Dean shakes his head. "I dragged you into this. I shouldn’t have, not when…"

"It wasn’t your damn decision." Jo stands up, crosses the room toward her bag. She digs out a shirt and pulls it over her head, then sits down on one of the beds to lace up her boots.

"You don’t," Dean starts, watching her. He swallows, then starts again. "You don’t gotta go now," he says, and Jo finishes one boot before she looks up at him and smiles. "This isn’t a breakup, sweetheart. You know how to find me if – well, you know how to find me."

Dean nods, and she ducks her head to finish with the other boot, then grabs her bag and stands up. She steps up to him and Dean thinks about months ago, kissing Lisa goodbye for the last time in Indiana. He thinks about watching Sam die in Lawrence. Jo says, quietly, "I get it, okay. If it was me, I…" she breathes out and then says, "I’ll see you."

He nods again and watches her walk to the door before he asks, "You want a ride somewhere?"

Jo glances back, smirking a little. "That Dodge out in the lot looked like it’d get me pretty far, right?" she asks.

Dean laughs and says, "Yeah, I’d say so." He stays in the motel until he hears Jo tear out of the parking lot in somebody else’s truck. Then he packs up his stuff, gets in the Impala, and plays Zeppelin at full blast to block out the silence.

*

Part of Jo is relieved when Dean tells her to go. It isn’t that the job’s gotten to her – although it does, sometimes, and that’s how she knows she’s still human, still a hunter instead of something worth hunting. It isn’t that she’s sick of Dean – they spend plenty of time bickering, sure, but to Jo that’s always been a source of comfort, like no matter how messed up the world gets, most days she still wants to give the guy a bloody nose. It isn’t even that she misses her mom – although she does, like breathing; she might be living her dad’s legacy, but Jo knows bone-deep that she’s a mama’s girl.

It isn’t any of that, entirely. It’s just that she’s tired, so tired, of spending her time trying to save someone who’s already been saved. She’s tired of arguing with herself whether telling Dean about Sam would do much good – that Sam’s alive, but he apparently has no goddamn interest in telling his brother.

She called Bobby a week after St. Paul, cried over the phone in some bathroom in North Dakota like a girl twenty years younger, and Bobby just said, "I know, kid. I don’t have the answers, either."

Jo doesn’t tell her mom. She reaches Montana a few days after she leaves Dean, ditching trucks and cars along the way, going slow to remind herself what it’s like to do this alone.

Turns out, she didn’t miss it all that much. She gets her choice in music, sure, and most days she stops driving as soon as the sun goes down, but by the time she reaches her mom’s place in Kalispell, she’s ready for company, any company.

They fight within minutes about where Jo should put her things, about how long she’s staying. Jo loves every fucking minute of it.

Ellen waits until dinner to start on the real questions, and even then, Jo’s ready for them. She tells her mom about the things she’s hunted, the places she’s seen. She speaks easily, not like a sullen kid trying to prove anyone wrong, and for the most part Ellen listens, only glancing disapprovingly at the bandage around Jo’s wrist, the cut just visible on her shoulder.

It’s only when Ellen asks about Dean that Jo slips up, dropping her gaze to the plate of home-cooked food in front of her. Her mom never used to cook, not like this, and for a second Jo nearly laughs, picturing Dean in front of a set-up like this.

Ellen doesn’t ask how Dean is – anyone that knows Dean can guess that –, just asks why Jo left.

And Jo, she knew all her reasons just a few days ago, but none of them seem so clear, now. She walked out of that motel like nothing, like she knew she’d be back, like this time that son of a bitch would call or send a goddamn text message, but the truth is she pulled that truck over five miles down the road and just sat there, for an hour, waiting to get her breath back.

The truth is it scares the hell out of her, thinking of Dean by himself again, no one but strangers to keep him in line.

Jo knows she can’t fool her mom, never really could, but she can’t tell the whole truth, either. Anyway, she’s spent too much damn time with Dean and she isn’t sure what the truth is anymore. So she looks up from her plate and shrugs, smiling just a little. "Figured it was either that or knock his teeth down his throat."

Ellen laughs then, rough and warm, and Jo’s missed that sound, up close, like nothing else. "Good girl," Ellen says, and for once, Jo doesn’t fight her on it.

*

Once Jo’s gone, Dean ditches California and spends a week in Tucson, Arizona taking care of a skin walker thing. After Tucson there’s New Mexico and Oklahoma, and then a long drive up to South Dakota to help Bobby out with a couple of witches making trouble nearby. They burn the bodies, one guy and one girl, and Bobby offers Dean a spot on the couch for the night, if he wants.

"You look like hell, boy," Bobby says, and Dean guesses he’s right. Seven months without Sam, two weeks without Jo, six days worth of stubble and no more than three hours of sleep each night – yeah, Dean guesses he’s been better.

He can’t remember when, though.

"Lookin’ pretty fit yourself, Bobby," Dean comments, and Bobby cuffs him on the back of the head with some spell book before they head inside for a couple of drinks.

"You heard anything from Jo at all?" Bobby asks once they’ve settled at a table in the kitchen. There are books all over the place as usual, a few Dean recognizes from the first couple weeks of trying to save Sam. Some are probably just what Bobby reads for bedtime stories.

Dean looks up from his glass, a little surprised. "Not really expecting to," he lies. It’s been two weeks, and Dean’s not too stupid to admit he liked having Jo around – not too stubborn to admit that he misses it – but he still figures she’s better off, same as anyone.

Bobby just grunts and nods, and they start talking cases instead, but before Dean dozes off that night, belly full of beer and whiskey, his finger scrolls over the contacts list in his phone. Lisa’s still in there, too, and for the first time since he left, Dean thinks about calling. He thinks about going back, about giving up, about doing what Sam _asked_ him to do.

He doesn’t, though. He puts his phone away and goes to sleep, and he’s gone from Bobby’s house by morning. He drives for days, staying places only long enough to sleep, hunting nothing for a while.

In Chesapeake Bay there’s a ghost, and Dean’s just finishing up the job, salting and burning some poor murdered bastard’s bones, when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He waits until he’s back in the car to look at it. There’s a picture of a house, snow-covered and lit up with Christmas lights, nothing Dean immediately recognizes. Below the picture is a message, though, and Dean snorts a little as he reads: _Merry Christmas, jackass_. He types a couple of different responses, but he doesn’t send any of them.

*

Jo doesn’t mean to stay with her mom for as long as she does. It’s December when she shows up, though, and after two weeks pass, she figures she might as well stay for Christmas. She and Ellen decorate the place, put up lights and tinsel the way they used to for the Roadhouse, and Jo’s chest aches a little when she remembers the beer can Christmas tree Ash made one year.

It snows on the 23rd, and when Jo gets tired of sitting around reading, when it gets too damn cold to practice shooting in the backyard, she and Ellen even make Christmas cookies. They burn the first two batches, and Jo accidently on purpose breaks half the third batch to eat while she frosts them. She thinks her dad must’ve still been alive the last time they did anything like this.

On Christmas Eve she sends Dean a quick text message, but she isn’t surprised when he doesn’t reply. She and Ellen watch Christmas specials neither of them have seen in years, and they fall asleep on the couch with the TV still on and the tree lights still blinking.

She plans to leave by New Year’s, then, but she sticks around to take down decorations, and somehow it’s the first week of January before she starts looking for hunts.

"Like hell you’re going," Ellen says when she catches Jo matching up the lunar cycle to a string of murders in Eugene, Oregon.

"Twenty-seven, Mom," Jo reminds her lightly, but when Ellen says, "Twenty-seven, my ass, I’m going with you," Jo puts up less of a fight than usual. The only werewolf she ever hunted was with Dean, and that was different.

They pack their things and spend three days in Eugene hunting down the werewolf. He’s tougher than what Jo expected after the last one, and tracking him in the snow is a bitch, but they catch up to him in some cabin where he nearly scratches Jo’s arm off before Ellen shoots the guy twice in the legs and once in the heart. Jo looks away when the humanity creeps back into the man’s blue-grey eyes.

He could be anybody.

Afterward, she and Ellen head back to Kalispell. Jo leaves on a few hunts, a ghost in Issaquah and a demonic possession in Seattle, but she doesn’t stay on the road for long. She’s in Laramie when she calls Dean finally, just under two months since she left, just to check that he’s breathing, but when she hits dial, all she gets is an automated voice telling her the number’s out of service.

She gets Dean’s new number off of Bobby a few days later when she’s back with her mom in Montana, and she calls, once, just to hear him give somebody else’s name on the voicemail, but she doesn’t leave a message.

*

Jo comes back in February. Dean isn’t looking for her, exactly. As it happens, there’s a job near where she and Ellen are staying – a job fifty-three miles west of where they’re staying, but a _job_ all the same.

He parks outside the little house in Kalispell, Montana and lets the engine run, lets Springsteen hum out of the stereo. He sits there for twenty minutes, an hour, waiting for he isn’t sure what. If it were Sam, Sam would know he was here. Sam would sense it, come running back even after all the times they’ve run from each other.

But Sam’s been dead for nine fucking months. Dean can’t even think about what that means in hell time if he’s sober.

Sam’s gone, and Jo’s here, and Dean isn’t sure what the hell he thinks he’s doing here when he’s the one that told her to go. Isn’t ever sure, anymore.

He pulls away from the house, exorcises the demons running some bar in Polson, and does what he can not to look damn near elated when he gets back to his motel that night and Jo’s there in the parking lot, arms folded to keep the cold away and waiting for him.

They go back to his room – a single, now, again – and Jo tosses her bag at the end of the bed, sits back against the headboard, and flips on the TV. After a minute, Dean joins her. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, waiting, and she finally says, "I’m not your fucking girlfriend, so don’t expect me to come after you every time. You know where my number is, Dean."

"Fair enough," Dean says. "How’d you find me, anyway?"

Jo smirks. "Told the guy at the desk I was your wife and I suspected you were messing around on me. Had to go through a hell of a lot of names before I figured out which one was yours." She quirks an eyebrow at him and Dean thinks, yeah, maybe he missed her a little more than he thought. "The Styx, Dean? Really?"

"REO Speedwagon," Dean counters easily, and Jo scowls at him. Dean laughs and Jo elbows him in the side, hard, but they watch TV for a while and Jo falls asleep with her head on his shoulder. He never asks her why she came back.

*

It’s easier than it should be, maybe, for Jo to get back into things. There’s a moment when she wakes up, that first day, that she has to take a second to remember where she is – why there’s someone next to her. For years, Jo’s been telling herself she’s done being stupid over Dean fucking Winchester. She’s been breaking her own rules for months, now, and she broke another showing up here last night. Somehow it doesn’t exactly seem that way, though.

She gets up first and takes a shower, then grabs coffee for each of them at a place down the street. There’s one missed call on her phone from her mom, but she doesn’t call back. _Everything’s fine_ , she texts, and she hopes it’s true.

They leave the hotel before checkout time; Jo suggests they head south, and Dean says it sounds good to him. They’re quiet in the car, quiet enough that Jo isn’t sure she should be here, that she should’ve come back, and it’s –

Yeah.

She starts thinking she’ll finish whatever’s next, and then leave again, go wherever, not back to her mom but just on the road. It hasn’t been the same, not since she left, but she knows she could get used to it again. That she’ll have to, eventually.

Dean keeps the music low while he drives. His eyes flicker toward her every once in a while like he might say something, but he doesn’t for the longest time. Jo gets tired of it, finally, hours in the car and hundreds of miles from Kalispell. " _What_?" she snaps.

Dean flinches a little, eyes going back to the road, and then he says, "Nothing." Jo opens her mouth to huff some smart reply, short-tempered as usual, never as confident as she’d like to be around him no matter how much she grows up, but Dean speaks first. "I just," he says, then shrugs. "I’m glad you came back."

She meets his gaze in the mirror, and he looks tired, more run down than she even remembers, but when her eyes catch his there’s still that spark to them, that little glimmer of whatever keeps Dean Winchester swinging after this many years of the world doing its damnedest to knock him out cold.

"Yeah, well," she says. "My mom and I would’ve scratched each other’s eyes out pretty soon, anyway."

It’s not true, not entirely. They bickered when Jo was there, sure; they could fight about just about anything, but nothing as bad as when Jo left yesterday. "Sounds about right," Dean says. "Does that mean I’m safe?"

Jo turns her head to look at him fully – at the stubble on his cheeks, the cuts on his hands from god knows what, the same leather jacket he’s been wearing for years. She looks at him, still here after everything, and she knows exactly what she’s doing here. "For now," she says, smiling back just a little. "Maybe."

*

There’s a banshee in Santa Clara, a ghost in Salt Lake. Dean drives and Jo argues with him while she flips through radio stations and reads whatever newspapers she can find. Once, he catches her reading an actual book, some novel he’s never heard of, and he teases her for a while before she whacks him on the head with it and says, "Fuck you, Kerouac, excuse me if your company isn’t constantly riveting."

It’s a little ridiculous how much Dean enjoys bickering with her.

Some days, she tells him about the places she’s been. Dean listens, mostly, only fading out when the stories sound familiar, too much like the pieces he’s missing. Jo doesn’t brag, though, not like most hunters Dean’s met. Dean knows she’ll fight tooth and goddamn nail to prove she’s tough, that she can draw up a devil’s trap and chant the right bits of Latin without having to stop and think, but when they’re passing through Iowa, headed nowhere in particular, Jo gets quiet and says, "I almost died here a while back."

There’s a pause; Dean isn’t sure whether to ask or not. Doesn’t matter how capable he knows she is, doesn’t matter that she’s been the one keeping him on his feet for the last nine and a half months – it still makes his skin itch thinking about what she’s saying, makes him want to dig up whatever it was and rip it back apart for her.

Chivalry’s his strong suit, clearly.

Instead, Dean jokes, "Lookin’ pretty lively to me, Jo."

She doesn’t tell him off, doesn’t hit him, just shakes her head and smiles faintly. "I slipped up. It was – there was this creature. Fear demon, basically. It told me things, made me see things…" she drifts off, and Dean has time to wonder what he’d see now, when his nightmares have come true a few times over. 

"Thing nearly cut me in half before I snapped out of it," Jo says. "I’ve still got the scars."

Dean knows the ones she’s talking about: two sets of long, jagged lines across her lower back. He’s traced the thin pink skin, the messy stitches, half a dozen times. He’s brushed the hair off Jo’s neck and sucked bruises into her skin while she digs her nails into his arms, while she wraps her legs around him and meets every push and pull.

He’s threaded his fingers through her hair and drifted off to the sound of her breathing.

"Did you get it?" Dean asks, once Jo’s gaze has returned to the window. Her hair’s down today, messy, and she’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday because they had to leave the last place in a hurry when Paul Rodgers’ card was declined.

Dean glances at Jo’s reflection in the window just in time to catch her smirk. "What kinda hunter do you think I am, huh?"

He doesn’t answer, but that’s answer enough. If he didn’t before, Dean knows who she is now. They’re a long, long way from Philadelphia.

*

They stay on the road for a few weeks, hunting whatever they find. Jo still looks through every book, and Dean still has nightmares. February turns into March turns into April, and Dean bitches about all the rain instead of the snow. Jo salvages a couple of tapes from a used bookstore in Tampa, and the guy behind the counter looks at her like she’s something out of a time machine, but when she tosses the tapes at Dean he grins wider than Jo’s seen in a while.

They hunt a couple of ghosts, even a goddamn Wendigo in Virginia, and it’s some time before Jo notices that things are shifting, gradually. That she’s been spending a hell of a lot less time, lately, dragging Dean out of bars. That every once in a while, Dean sleeps through the night.

Of course, she doesn’t mention it. When they’re headed toward Illinois from Colorado, Dean still drives out of their way to avoid Kansas entirely. His hands still shake if he happens to see something of Sam’s in the trunk of the Impala; he still has circles under his eyes (but then, Jo does, too). But in Nashville, when Jo opens another book that was probably written in the third damn century, book number seven hundred and forty that’s supposed to save someone who’s already been saved, Dean grabs it out of her hands.

"You want me to drive?" Jo asks, and Dean gives her exactly the look she’d been aiming for, like he’s never heard anything so offensive, before he sobers and says, "You don’t gotta do that anymore."

"Dean," she starts, but as she reaches for the book, Dean shakes his head. "It’s not," he says. "I mean, I’m gonna keep – he’s my _brother_ ," Dean says, like maybe, somehow, Jo’s forgotten. "But there’s still other people to save, right?" Dean asks, looking over at her. They haven’t started driving yet; they’re still parked in some crummy hotel lot about to head out of Tennessee.

Jo nods, just once. "Yeah," she says, "there are." She stares at him a while, unsure what else to say. She knows he’s not giving up – knows _she’s_ not giving up, even if she knows the truth. But she’s gotten so damn used to the ghost riding shotgun with them, so used to it that even she forgets the truth, sometimes.

The truth is, for now, that Dean looks over at her and smiles, and it’s something so close to what she remembers, something so close to fondness, that it’s all she can do not to roll her eyes at herself. "He told me not to try to pull him back out, you know," Dean says then. "He told me to find some girl and settle down, live some apple pie life."

Jo bets there’s more to it than that, but she doesn’t ask. Every hunter that’s in the business for a while wishes for something like that, sometimes. She doesn’t say that, though, just fixes a look on him and says, "I don’t know how many times I have to tell you I’m not your fucking girlfriend, and I’m sure as hell not settling down any time soon." Dean laughs, and Jo tries not to smile too hard when he says, "Let’s hope not."

She shakes her head and sits back in her seat with another book, and Dean guns the engine and starts off toward the next job in Kentucky. Jo knows this isn’t going to last. She knows she’ll have to tell Dean about Sam, eventually – or that Sam will show up somewhere down the line and she’ll leave them, a little regretfully, a little gratefully. She knows this won’t last, but when she drags Dean down and kisses him outside some diner in Ludlow, she almost wishes, for a minute, that it would.


End file.
